ON THE TE ACHING OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 



353 



will then have nothing to unlearn. This is an 

 absolutely incalculable gain. Unlearning is by 

 far the hardest task that was ever imposed on a 

 student, or on any one else. And it is also one of 

 those altogether avoidable tasks which, when we 

 have allowed them to become necessary, irritate 

 us as much as does a perfectly unprofitable one 

 — such as the prison-crank or shot-drill. And in 

 this lies by far the greatest responsibility of all 

 writers and teachers. Merely to fail in giving 

 instruction is bad enough, but to give false infor- 

 mation can be the work only of utter ignorance 

 or of carelessness, amounting, so far as its effects 

 go almost to diabolical wickedness. 



Every one of you who has habitually made 

 use of his opportunities of observation must have 

 already seen a great deal which it will be my duty 

 to help him to understand. But I should prefer, 

 if possible, to have the entire guidance of him in 

 helping him to understand it. And I should 

 commence by warning him in the most formal 

 manner against the study of books of an essen- 

 tially unscientific character. By all means let 

 him read fiction and romance as a relaxation from 

 severer studies ; but let the fiction be devoted to 

 its legitimate object, human will and human 

 action; don't let it tamper with the truths of 

 science. From the "Arabian Nights," through 

 " Don Quixote," to Scott, the student has an am- 

 ple field of really profitable reading of this kind ; 

 but when he wishes to study, let him carefully 

 \ eschew the unprofitable, or rather pernicious, spe- 

 cies of literary fiction which is commonly called 

 " popular science." 



As I have already said, in this elementary 

 class, you will require very little mathematical 

 knowledge, but such knowledge is in itself one 

 of those wholly good things of which no one can 

 ever have too much. And, moreover, it is one 

 of the few things which it is not very easy to 

 teach badly. A really good student will learn 

 mathematics in spile of the badness of his teach- 

 ing. No pompous generalities can gloss over an 

 incorrect demonstration ; at least in the eyes of 

 any one competent to understand a correct one. 

 Can it be on this account that there are so many 

 more aspirants to the teaching of physics than to 

 that of the higher mathematics ? If so, it is a 

 very serious matter for the progress of science in 

 this country ; as bad, at least, as was the case in 

 those old days when it was supposed that a man 

 who had notoriously failed in everything else 

 must have been designed by Nature for the voca- 

 tion of schoolmaster ; a truly wonderful applica- 

 tion of teleology. 



59 



But even this queer kind of dominie was not 

 so strange a monstrosity as the modern manikins 

 of paper science, who are always thrusting their 

 crude notions on the world ; the anatomists who 

 have never dissected, the astronomers who have 

 never used a telescope, or the geologists who have 

 never carried a hammer ! The old metaphysical 

 pretenders to science had at least some small 

 excuse for their conduct in the fact that true 

 science was all but unknown in the days when 

 they chiefly flourished, and when their a priori 

 dogmatism was too generally looked upon as 

 science. But that singular race is now wellnigh 

 extinct, and in their place have come the paper- 

 scientists (the barbarous word suits them exact- 

 ly) — those who, with a strange mixture of half- 

 apprehended fact and thoroughly appreciated 

 nonsense, pour out continuous floods of informa- 

 tion of the most self-contradictory character. 

 Such writers loudly claim the honors of discovery 

 for any little chance remark of theirs which re- 

 search may happen ultimately to substantiate, 

 but keep quietly in the background the mass of 

 unreason in which it was originally enveloped. 

 This species may be compared to midges, perhaps 

 occasionally to mosquitoes, continually pestering 

 men of science to an extent altogether dispropor- 

 tionate to its own importance in the scale of be- 

 ing. Now and then it buzzes shrilly enough to 

 attract the attention of the great sound-hearted 

 but unreasoning because non-scientific public, 

 which, when it docs interfere with scientific mat- 

 ters, can hardly fail to make a mess of them. 



Think, for a moment, of the late vivisection 

 crusade or of the anii-vaccinators. What absolute 

 fiends in human form were not the whole race of 

 really scientific medical men made out to be, at 

 least in the less cautious of these heated denun- 

 ciations ? How many camels are unconsciously 

 swallowed while these gnats are being so carefully 

 strained out, is obvious to all who can take a calm, 

 and therefore a not necessarily unreasonable, view 

 of the matter. 



But the victims of such people are not in 

 scientific ranks alone. Every man who occupies 

 a prominent position of any kind is considered as 

 a fit subject for their attacks. By private letters 

 and public appeals, gratuitous advice and remon- 

 strance are perpetually intruded upon him. If 

 he succeed in anything, it is of course because 

 these unsought hints were taken ; if he fail, it is 

 because they were contemptuously left unheeded ! 



Enough of this necessary but unpleasant di- 

 gression. I know that it is at least quite as easy 

 to understand the most recondite mathematics 



